“The Struggle for Urban Recycling and Community Gardens in San Francisco” by Soumyaa Kapil Behrens

Where: Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, between Guerrero and Valencia

When: Saturday, November 10, at 12:30 pm

While filming her graduate thesis project, My Garbage, My Neighborhood, a short that follows the struggle of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC), filmmaker Soumyaa Kapil Behrens became deeply committed to HANC’s mission and its community. From this personal involvement originates 780 Frederick, a grassroots docu-noir still in the making that traces the gritty politics of gentrification in the San Francisco Haight Ashbury Neighborhood. During this film and panel event, the filmmaker will show exclusive clips from her never-before-seen feature and will discuss with the parties at stake the issues revolving around the eviction, the process of gentrification, and perhaps the loss of the counterculture which once was at the heart of the Haight Ashbury community.

The Nominating Committee of HANC has made the following recommendations for Officers and Board members for 2013. All HANC members are eligible to serve. The election will take place at the November meeting.

Garden for the Environment will offer the following classes in November and December of 2012. All classes will be offered at Garden for the Environment, San Francisco’s organic demonstration garden at 7th and Lawton Street. Since its founding in 1990, the garden has operated as a demonstration site for small-scale urban ecological food production, organic gardening, compost education and low water-use landscaping. For more information, call (415) 731-5627, or go to www.gardenfortheenvironment.org.

Year-round gardening is one of our favorite things about the Bay Area and now, as we find ourselves squarely in Fall, it's time to think about your winter vegetable garden. Join us for this class which we offer on the 2nd Saturday of every month for seasonal-specific instruction for year-round vegetable gardening.

This month we'll cover:

- Vegetables to plant and what to harvest in Fall and Winter - Fall & Winter Plant Care - Soil Fertility and Cover Cropping - Weeds, weeds, weeds! What to do about them.

Proposition C is a Charter Amendment creating a Housing Trust Fund within the General Fund of San Francisco. If passed the fund will devote some $1.4 Billion over the next thirty years to the construction, acquisition and rehabilitation of permanently affordable rental housing in San Francisco, down payment assistance for first time homeowner, a homeowner stabilization fund for moderate income owners facing foreclosures, and a Infrastructure Challenge Grant Fund for small neighborhood parks, pedestrian safety improvements and community service space. 90% of the fund will be aimed at rental homes affordable to households earning no more than $50,000 , a figure covering the vast majority of San Francisco’s families with children and seniors. It is expected that each dollar from the fund will leverage at least a dollar from state and federal sources, producing housing for well over 30,000 San Franciscans over the life of the program.

In addition, Proposition C will “incentivize” the development of middle income housing by reducing from 15% to 12% ( a 20% reduction) the requirement on market rate developers to build Below Market Rate (BMR) homes on the site of their market rate development. Since neither the current “in-lieu” fee nor the 20% requirement for “off-site” BMR production is reduced it is expected that more “on-site” opportunities for middle income San Franciscans will be created.

The proposal was developed by Mayor Lee and a Housing Trust Fund Task Force made up of business and labor, community and industry representatives. It seeks to replace funding lost in state and federal cuts to affordable housing assistance and has received the support of a wide coalition of supporters. It was placed on the ballot with the support of nine of the eleven Supervisors.

HANC will be campaigning for the measure and will help organize two weekend mobilizations in District 5 on September 29th and October 11th at 10 AM at the Richardson Apartments, at Fulton and Gough.

We do not trust the current Recreation and Parks Department (RPD) management to spend taxpayer money wisely. RPD wants to evict HANC’s community garden, built at no cost to the City, and spend $250,000 to replace it with a community garden.

RPD has not agreed to maintain or run what it builds. It has locked out the public to sell or lease our parks to the highest bidder. Families have been priced out of many park venues. Free or low-cost events have been cancelled or moved out of the parks because of excessive fees. These include outrageous fees to the Park Patrol, which has been mired in scandal. RPD’s mission should be to provide parks and recreation centers for the public, but it prefers being a “public-private partnership” profit center.

After last June’s election, RPD entered into a lease for Coit Tower that ignored the will of the voters. Ignoring public opinion has caused RPD to spend millions of dollars on legal fees.

We support improving our parks and recreation centers, but only when they remain free and open to all.

On September 14, an activist group came to our site at 780 Frederick and transformed it into a space of peaceful protest and community gathering. The event had music from the Classical Revolution, the Interstellar Transmissions and many other bands and performance artists. There was yoga. There was meditation. There was a seed library and teach-in workshops on ecology, self reliance and the fate of urban agriculture in our city today. Even the police and the park rangers swung by a few times, to feast their eyes on the goings-on in the garden.

At nightfall, the music died down to un-amplified drumbeats and a makeshift screen drew everyone’s attention with videos and dialogue about community togetherness.

Thanks for sticking up for us--Space TranSFormers--come back anytime. Hopefully, we will still be here to welcome you.

Space TranSFormers will have Workday Wednesday every Wednesday beginning at 3:00 pm at our site. More information is available at their website. For the latest on Kezar Gardens, go to kezargardens.com

An ad hoc committee organized to come up with ideas for making the Alvord Lake entrance to Golden Gate Park more inviting, had its second meeting last week.

Attendees included three Park Station Police Officers, three Rec & Parks employees (and one retired Rec & Park employee), two art students from the Academy of Art, one representative of Supervisor Olague’s office, and eight neighborhood residents.

The art students presented their class projects which had the site at Alvord Lake as a “challenge project” for them. Both projects, while interesting, were focused on architectural enhancements that seemed to go beyond what the group is seeking.

The officer representing Captain Corrales outlined to the group the complexity of the social scene now existing at the site, and reminded us that not everyone there is selling drugs. One officer reported on the problem created by the garden between the pillars, which serves as a hiding place for drugs and seating. He suggested that the garden be removed and an information kiosk/booth be installed.

Most of the resident comments and ideas dealt with landscaping alternatives for the area, and the idea of an information kiosk/booth met with positive interest.

The next meeting of the group (as yet unnamed) will be at the site on Saturday, October 27 at noon. This is the normal work day of a group of volunteers who regularly work with Rec & Park gardeners from 9-12. Bring your work gloves and ideas!

Kezar Gardens Artist-in Residence Soumyaa Kapil Behrens has created a website with words and pictures (and videos) that give a flavor of what it's like at Kezar Gardens, and some of the issues about our recycling center. We encourage you to visit Kezar Gardens at 780 Frederick Street, and also to visit the website, at kezargardens.com. Here are some samples from the website:

Human Be-In Then and Now

Sit down with Diamond Dave and Soumyaa Kapil Behrens as they discuss the history of the Hippie Revolution and the first Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in 1967 on Mutiny Radio. (Watch the video here). Diamond Dave was there, at the start of the movement, and will be streaming his show on Mutiny Radio live from the event this weekend.

The conversation goes on all weekend. Kick off the dialogue with the local band Classical Revolution 3pm Friday September 14th at ground zero: 780 Frederick Street. Make some love, make some community, make some gardens, and make some history while you are at it.

The Human Be-In kicked off as a “gathering of the tribes” in January of 1967. This weekend, it will be re-created by a group called the Space TranSFormers. They hope to raise awareness about the outrageous eviction of Kezar Gardens, the redevelopment plan for Hayes Valley Farm and the removal of the Free Farm in San Francisco. They will openly protest the leadership of the Recreation and Parks Department, namely Phil Ginsburg who has been heavily criticized for pandering to private interests regarding park land governance.

In May, a group of recent college graduates participating in the City Hall Fellows program, a fellowship program that connects recent college graduates with city government to study social problems, released a report on the implementation of San Francisco’s sit/lie law. On August 15, the Fellows presented their report to the Haight community. The report showed that Park Station is citing more people for sit/lie than any other police station in the City, that the people who receive citations are not receiving useful referrals to services and that the City is not tracking whether sit/lie-related interactions with SFPD is actually directing people to services, and that SFPD and the City are not accurately tracking the number of sit/lie citations issued by SFPD.

As the Policy and Advocacy Coordinator at Homeless Youth Alliance (HYA), I have some opinions on sit/lie that I’d like to share with the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council.

Sitting and lying should not be considered criminal behavior. The appropriate response to street homelessness is the provision of culturally appropriate outreach and connection with appropriate services. This is the only response that will result in a decrease in street homelessness.

Criminalization policies targeted at the behavior of homeless people have not, are not, and will never be an effective tool for solving homelessness.

The criminal justice system is not an appropriate vehicle for delivering services and support to people without homes.

City resources would be better spent in strengthening the service system (substance abuse treatment, harm reduction, mental health treatment, peer-based outreach, safe supportive housing) for homeless youth than on the enforcement of homeless criminalization policies like sit/lie.

At HYA, we know how to end homelessness among our youth. Peer-based services delivered by culturally-competent outreach workers help to engage our participants, often regarded as the most “difficult to serve” of the homeless youth in San Francisco, connecting them with vital housing, counseling, mental health, and drug treatment services. Access to these vital services is what helps end homelessness among our participants.

Some Suggestions

So, what are some constructive ideas for reducing homelessness in our community? I’d like to offer some suggestions that, unlike sit/lie, are targeted towards providing the services that homeless people need rather than criminalizing the behavior that is a side-effect of homelessness and poverty.

San Francisco needs more housing affordable to low-income people (

Homeless San Franciscans need 24-hour access to shelter as well as access to basic necessities like food, toilets, showers, clothing, and hygiene items.

Recognize the unique service needs of the homeless youth in the Haight and strengthen programs that help hard-to-serve populations who fall through the cracks and don’t fit in to traditional service programs.

The August edition of the Sunset Beacon/Richmond Review has an in depth story on the Kezar Gardens eviction. Written by Tom Pendergast, the story quotes from Recreation and Parks Department staff testimony at the December 2nd 2010 RPD Commission hearing on a concept design for a "garden resource center" and combines it with excerpts from a lengthy interview Pendergast had with Kezar Gardens director Ed Dunn.

The article outlines the RPD's dastardly, scorched earth campaign to keep the bottom one percent from getting money for recyclables. The reader will be floored by the amazing cynicism of RPD's efforts to replace a garden with a garden, destroying ten green jobs while abusing City funds.